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Saturday, July 09, 2016

I see it in the morning when I am sitting out on the deck. I see it in the afternoon. I see it in the evening. I see it through the car window. I see it outside the supermarket and inside and around the community center. I see it in the town across the bay. I see it on the bridge as we come and go. I see it outside the produce store. I see it at Costco and at all points in between, where you can see it at all, cause you don't see it much on the parkway; they don't let pedestrians perambulate on the parkway. I do see it sometimes in the cars going by when complete idiots have it up to their ears. I'm talking about cellphones and it mystifies and astonishes me. More often than not, people... especially among the most recent generation, are thumbhumping their cellphones, or chirping away on them and I am convinced this goes on all day long and I cannot fathom the need.

It stands to reason, if I see this happening everywhere I go that it is also happening everywhere I am not and if these Shmoos are riveted to whatever is taking place on these tiny screens, every time I see them, then they are also riveted every time I do not see them; such is the force and profundity of logic in application from the sphere of Visible. Sometimes there is a gaggle of tweens and teens passing in unconscious ranks of cellular intoxication. Who is paying for all this meter time traffic? My friend pays Verizon 110 dollars a month for the contract. I never knew the fee could run this high, when you can get unlimited talk and data for 45 a month. I can't imagine what it must be for a family of five or six. A whole lot of people have a lot more money than I. My cellphone sits there and I seldom get a call period. Most of the time, whatever small amount I have on my 'pay as you go account' runs out at the end of the month because I didn't use it, Mostly I use my paid Skype account. To put it in perspective, I put 30 dollars on my Skype account eight months ago and I still have ten dollars on the account. It appears to run about ten cents an hour and you can call any landline or cellphone from paid Skype. This includes international long distance. I could be wrong about the precise cost but whatever it is, it's not much.

Every couple of months I go to Costco and spend 300 dollars and get what would cost me a thousand at the supermarkets. The food lasts and lasts and is all high end and much of it gourmet. I cook at home and unless I am provoked into it, I don't eat at restaurants, where the quality and flavor does not approach a home cooked meal. Keeping your expenses focused, reduces your expenses somewhere north of 50 percent. I'm not cheap but I deplore being stupid about cost of living. What's the point? Conspicuous excess surrounds me.

The minimum rentals here are around 2500 a week in the season and can be considerably higher. I couldn't live in a cardboard box in this location but luckily my friend owns this unit. As much as you hear about economic downturns and uncertainties of the kind in the US, there are a whole lot of people doing very well. You see Range Rovers and Escalades, BMWs and Mercedes going by all day long. Almost all of the cars are new or near new. It costs 20 a day to park on the weekends and 15 during the week. A single scoop of soft ice cream on the boardwalk is 5 dollars and change. You have to pay 5 dollars a day per person for a beach pass and on and on and on in this commercially fixated zone. It's kind of like New York City on the shore.

I've had occasions to go to the casinos, because we get free buffet passes and I marvel, I truly marvel at the people tossing their money down the drain in search of more money to toss down the drain. Then you hear about casinos closing and hard times in the world of gambling syndicates. How can you not be making big money from a casino? Something more than you can see is going on. They spent over a billion dollars building this one casino here and it closed shortly after it opened. Word has it that it closed because, unlike all the other casinos, they didn't provide smoking sections. Gamblers drink and smoke. That's a fact. So... some guy came in. He lives in a van and he bought the place for 350 million. This I know from a friend of mine who... in earlier times had inherited a lot of money (all gone now) and in those times he met a lot of people like himself and he hears about things like this now because he knows people who know people. Kinky stuff. The guy bought the place but it sits there and he camps outside it in his van. My friends says that his sources tell him this fellow is not stupid but I think it is safe to say he is eccentric.

I am a cultural voyeur so I wander the internet and check out the costs of trips to exclusive locations; cruise ship jaunts and living enclaves like Sedona and so many places. You can spend a fortune in a short time and people do. Some people spend a quarter of a million a month, renting a place to live. Some of them have private jets that cost tens of millions of dollars and some have ocean liner-like boats that cost up to a billion dollars. David Geffen has two and both of them cost several hundred million dollars. I don't have a price for the constantly rotating stable of young boys who come and go on them. I'm guessing in these days of PC that it is all a tax write off or part of a scientific escapade that studies the nature of something. James Cameron has something like that where he goes to study reef activity and destroys it in the process; at least that is what one Caribbean island charged him with.

I know that many of you live on the edge of getting by in the day to day. Only a calculated frugality keeps me above water. You'd be surprised how well you can do when you don't want much. Some folks though, they got a lot more than they can spend, even when they spend in a weekend more than we make in a year, or more... sometimes much more. What I see is that they are prisoners of the material realm. I understand the attraction. It has to be nice to be able to do near anything you want to do. I also understand the spiritual cost and that is much higher than I would be willing to pay. For many of them, the spiritual side of the equation never makes it on to the flow charts, so... they flow, but in only one direction.

The manifest world is in a torment of transition. In this particular year there will be many an agonizing event. Behind the scenes, the possessed jockey for positions of influence, as the status quo ramps up the world control schematic and whole nations are thrown under the bus. What happened in Dallas is just the beginning. There is a perfect storm of ignorance, appetite and frustration/aggression, moving toward a further nexus point. Religious hysteria is at an all time high and it is counter imbalanced by Satanism and New Age hucksterism. Naked greed is running in all directions with hands larger than the body they belong to. The idea of a supreme being has been tortured into an anthropomorphic absurdity; something like a one hundred foot Jesus made of cheese that believers will travel hundreds of miles to see.

One of the interesting cultural movements that has been going on for some while is thousands of people in RV's who travel around to the different malls in the country, just for the experience of visiting them. Mall of America is one of their chief shrines. Tony Robbins had a firewalk session recently that was attended by 7,000 participants, meaning there was more people than that and a couple of dozen got burned. The explanation was that compared to how many engaged, two dozen is an insignificant number. Try as I might, I cannot see the point of doing this to begin with. I cannot imagine I would conquer my fears in this manner. I usually go up against whatever the fear is, directly.

What Robbins should have done was to invite Benny Hinn to join him and he could have healed everyone on the back end. Of course, if you're on a trust fund or you've gotten tired of being one of The Rich Kids on Instagram, you might want to take a cruise to meet God through the kind offices of those who don't know a damn thing about him/her. I once considered carving out a niche for myself in terms of providing a service by going on lecture tours and discussing my brand of metaphysics. What I do now is what I came up with because too much public exposure can get away from you. The next thing you know you are in a carnival atmosphere and you've turned into a clown. In the fall I'll be looping the US; southern route west, south-north up California and then the northern route back. If you want to meet up anywhere along those courses we can do this and it won't cost you a dime, whether it is lunch or overnight. It's probably the time to get this done, especially given that I am relatively sane at the moment (grin).

I figure that cruising through the wreckage and dancing in the aftermath is something I can manage, on a case by case state(s) of consideration so... let me know; intelligent planning has a way of maximizing the profits of the moment and even long term for that matter. This wasn't a significant post in any way but it's part of what we do in a transitioning environment as Mr. Apocalypse takes it up a whole series of notches, hopefully buenos notches.